For a long time I’ve wanted to create a module that would shed light on how perl uses memory. This year I decided to do something about it.

My research and development didn’t yield much fruit in time for OSCON in July, where my talk ended up being about my research and plans. (I also tried to explain that RSS isn’t a useful measurement for this, and that malloc buffering means even total process size isn’t a very useful measurement.) I was invited to speak at YAPC::Asia in Tokyo in September and really wanted to have something worthwhile to demonstrate there.

I’m delighted to say that some frantic hacking (aka Conference Driven Development) yielded a working demo just in time and, after a little more polish, I’ve now uploaded Devel::SizeMe to CPAN.

This is the text of a speech I originally wrote for the International Speech Competition at my Toastmasters club in April 2012. (I won the club competition and came second in the area competition a week or so later.)

In July I gave a slightly modified version, reproduced here, as a 5 minute Lightning Talk at OSCON in Portland OR. Continue reading →

You have a production system, with many different kinds of application services running on many servers, all using the perl 5.8.8 supplied by the system.

You want to upgrade to use perl 5.14.1

You don’t want to change the system perl.

You’re using CPAN modules that are slightly out of date but you can’t upgrade them because newer versions have dependencies that require perl 5.10.

The perl application codebase is large and has poor test coverage.

You want developers to be able to easily test their code with different versions of perl.

You don’t want a risky all-at-once “big bang” upgrade. Individual production installations should be able to use different perl versions, even if only for a few days, and to switch back and forth easily.

You want to simplify future perl upgrades.

I imagine there are lots of people in similar situations.

In this post I want to explore how I’m tackling a similar problem, both for my own benefit and in the hope it’ll be useful to others. Continue reading →

For the past year I’ve been rather distracted, with little time to devote to Open Source projects. I’ve been working on a different kind of project, adding an extension to our home. It’s been quite a journey.

After much planning (the plumbing Statement of Works, for example, covers four pages), and our fair share of trials and tribulations, the builders broke ground two weeks ago. Now, after days of digging and rock-breaking, the foundations trenches are all dug out and the concrete will be poured tomorrow morning. Finally, we’ll be “out of the ground”.

Naturally I want to be around to handle issues as they arise, so this year I won’t be going to OSCON or YAPC::EU. If all goes well we should be completed in time for me to attend the London Perl Workshop in November.

Meanwhile I hope to find a little time for catching up on outstanding issues with DBI and NYTProf and perhaps a little more blogging.

The company I work for, TigerLead.com, has another job opening in West LA:

As a Senior Developer, you will be playing a central role in the design, development, and delivery of cutting-edge web applications for one of the most heavily-trafficked network of real estate sites on the web. You will work in a small, collaborative environment with other seasoned pros and with the direct support of the company’s owners and senior management. Your canvas and raw materials include rich data sets totaling several million property listings replenished daily by hundreds of external data feeds. This valuable data and our powerful end-user tools to access it are deployed across several thousand real estate search sites used by more than a million home-buyer leads and growing by 50K+ users each month. The 1M+ leads using our search tools are in turn tracked and cultivated by the several thousand real estate professionals using our management software. This is an outstanding opportunity to see your creations immediately embraced by a large community of users as you work within a creative and supportive environment that is both professional and non-bureaucratic at the same time, offering the positives of a start-up culture without the drama and instability.

If that sounds like interesting work to you then take a look at the full job posting.

TigerLead is a lovely company to work for and this is a great opportunity. Highly recommended.